CVPR 2023 Papers

Optical flow estimation is a fundamental functionality in computer vision. An event-based camera, which asynchronously detects sparse intensity changes, is an ideal device for realizing low-latency estimation of the optical flow owing to its low-latency sensing mechanism. An existing method using local plane fitting of events could utilize the sparsity to realize incremental updates for low-latency estimation; however, its output is merely a normal component of the full optical flow. An alternative approach using a frame-based deep neural network could estimate the full flow; however, its intensive non-incremental dense operation prohibits the low-latency estimation. We propose tangentially elongated Gaussian (TEG) belief propagation (BP) that realizes incremental full-flow estimation. We model the probability of full flow as the joint distribution of TEGs from the normal flow measurements, such that the marginal of this distribution with correct prior equals the full flow. We formulate the marginalization using a message-passing based on the BP to realize efficient incremental updates using sparse measurements. In addition to the theoretical justification, we evaluate the effectiveness of the TEGBP in real-world datasets; it outperforms SOTA incremental quasi-full flow method by a large margin. The code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

Vision-centric joint perception and prediction (PnP) has become an emerging trend in autonomous driving research. It predicts the future states of the traffic participants in the surrounding environment from raw RGB images. However, it is still a critical challenge to synchronize features obtained at multiple camera views and timestamps due to inevitable geometric distortions and further exploit those spatial-temporal features. To address this issue, we propose a temporal bird's-eye-view pyramid transformer (TBP-Former) for vision-centric PnP, which includes two novel designs. First, a pose-synchronized BEV encoder is proposed to map raw image inputs with any camera pose at any time to a shared and synchronized BEV space for better spatial-temporal synchronization. Second, a spatial-temporal pyramid transformer is introduced to comprehensively extract multi-scale BEV features and predict future BEV states with the support of spatial priors. Extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset show that our proposed framework overall outperforms all state-of-the-art vision-based prediction methods.

Recent researches reveal that StyleGAN can generate highly realistic images, inspiring researchers to use pretrained StyleGAN to generate high-fidelity swapped faces. However, existing methods fail to meet the expectations in two essential aspects of high-fidelity face swapping. Their results are blurry without pore-level details and fail to preserve identity for challenging cases. To overcome the above artifacts, we innovatively construct a series of identity-preserving semantic bases of StyleGAN (called StyleIPSB) in respect of pose, expression, and illumination. Each basis of StyleIPSB controls one specific semantic attribute and disentangles with the others. The StyleIPSB constrains style code in the subspace of W+ space to preserve pore-level details. StyleIPSB gives us a novel tool for high-fidelity face swapping, and we propose a three-stage framework for face swapping with StyleIPSB. Firstly, we transform the target facial images' attributes to the source image. We learn the mapping from 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) parameters, which capture the prominent semantic variance, to the coordinates of StyleIPSB that show higher identity-preserving and fidelity. Secondly, to transform detailed attributes which 3DMM does not capture, we learn the residual attribute between the reenacted face and the target face. Finally, the face is blended into the background of the target image. Extensive results and comparisons demonstrate that StyleIPSB can effectively preserve identity and pore-level details. The results of face swapping can achieve state-of-the-art performance. We will release our code at https://github.com/a686432/StyleIPSB.

Images taken in a low light condition with the presence of camera shake suffer from motion blur and photon shot noise. While state-of-the-art image restoration networks show promising results, they are largely limited to well-illuminated scenes and their performance drops significantly when photon shot noise is strong. In this paper, we propose a new blur estimation technique customized for photon-limited conditions. The proposed method employs a gradient-based backpropagation method to estimate the blur kernel. By modeling the blur kernel using a low-dimensional representation with the key points on the motion trajectory, we significantly reduce the search space and improve the regularity of the kernel estimation problem. When plugged into an iterative framework, our novel low-dimensional representation provides improved kernel estimates and hence significantly better deconvolution performance when compared to end-to-end trained neural networks.

We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo & shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications.

We present a Non-parametric Network for 3D point cloud analysis, Point-NN, which consists of purely non-learnable components: farthest point sampling (FPS), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and pooling operations, with trigonometric functions. Surprisingly, it performs well on various 3D tasks, requiring no parameters or training, and even surpasses existing fully trained models. Starting from this basic non-parametric model, we propose two extensions. First, Point-NN can serve as a base architectural framework to construct Parametric Networks by simply inserting linear layers on top. Given the superior non-parametric foundation, the derived Point-PN exhibits a high performance-efficiency trade-off with only a few learnable parameters. Second, Point-NN can be regarded as a plug-and-play module for the already trained 3D models during inference. Point-NN captures the complementary geometric knowledge and enhances existing methods for different 3D benchmarks without re-training. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for understanding 3D point clouds with non-parametric methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Point-NN.

Denoising is a crucial step for hyperspectral image (HSI) applications. Though witnessing the great power of deep learning, existing HSI denoising methods suffer from limitations in capturing the non-local self-similarity. Transformers have shown potential in capturing long-range dependencies, but few attempts have been made with specifically designed Transformer to model the spatial and spectral correlation in HSIs. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a spectral enhanced rectangle Transformer, driving it to explore the non-local spatial similarity and global spectral low-rank property of HSIs. For the former, we exploit the rectangle self-attention horizontally and vertically to capture the non-local similarity in the spatial domain. For the latter, we design a spectral enhancement module that is capable of extracting global underlying low-rank property of spatial-spectral cubes to suppress noise, while enabling the interactions among non-overlapping spatial rectangles. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both synthetic noisy HSIs and real noisy HSIs, showing the effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of both objective metric and subjective visual quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MyuLi/SERT.

Face super-resolution (FSR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) face images from the low-resolution (LR) ones. With the advent of deep learning, the FSR technique has achieved significant breakthroughs. However, existing FSR methods either have a fixed receptive field or fail to maintain facial structure, limiting the FSR performance. To circumvent this problem, Fourier transform is introduced, which can capture global facial structure information and achieve image-size receptive field. Relying on the Fourier transform, we devise a spatial-frequency mutual network (SFMNet) for FSR, which is the first FSR method to explore the correlations between spatial and frequency domains as far as we know. To be specific, our SFMNet is a two-branch network equipped with a spatial branch and a frequency branch. Benefiting from the property of Fourier transform, the frequency branch can achieve image-size receptive field and capture global dependency while the spatial branch can extract local dependency. Considering that these dependencies are complementary and both favorable for FSR, we further develop a frequency-spatial interaction block (FSIB) which mutually amalgamates the complementary spatial and frequency information to enhance the capability of the model. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art FSR methods in recovering face images. The implementation and model will be released at https://github.com/wcy-cs/SFMNet.

We propose SparseFusion, a sparse view 3D reconstruction approach that unifies recent advances in neural rendering and probabilistic image generation. Existing approaches typically build on neural rendering with re-projected features but fail to generate unseen regions or handle uncertainty under large viewpoint changes. Alternate methods treat this as a (probabilistic) 2D synthesis task, and while they can generate plausible 2D images, they do not infer a consistent underlying 3D. However, we find that this trade-off between 3D consistency and probabilistic image generation does not need to exist. In fact, we show that geometric consistency and generative inference can be complementary in a mode seeking behavior. By distilling a 3D consistent scene representation from a view-conditioned latent diffusion model, we are able to recover a plausible 3D representation whose renderings are both accurate and realistic. We evaluate our approach across 51 categories in the CO3D dataset and show that it outperforms existing methods, in both distortion and perception metrics, for sparse view novel view synthesis.

Modern neural networks are over-parameterized and thus rely on strong regularization such as data augmentation and weight decay to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. The dominant form of data augmentation applies invariant transforms, where the learning target of a sample is invariant to the transform applied to that sample. We draw inspiration from human visual classification studies and propose generalizing augmentation with invariant transforms to soft augmentation where the learning target softens non-linearly as a function of the degree of the transform applied to the sample: e.g., more aggressive image crop augmentations produce less confident learning targets. We demonstrate that soft targets allow for more aggressive data augmentation, offer more robust performance boosts, work with other augmentation policies, and interestingly, produce better calibrated models (since they are trained to be less confident on aggressively cropped/occluded examples). Combined with existing aggressive augmentation strategies, soft targets 1) double the top-1 accuracy boost across Cifar-10, Cifar-100, ImageNet-1K, and ImageNet-V2, 2) improve model occlusion performance by up to 4x, and 3) half the expected calibration error (ECE). Finally, we show that soft augmentation generalizes to self-supervised classification tasks.

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved using precomputed masks. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. Compared to the state-of-the-art, SliceMatch achieves a 19% lower median localization error on the VIGOR benchmark using the same VGG16 backbone at 150 frames per second, and a 50% lower error when using a ResNet50 backbone.

This paper, for the very first time, introduces human sketches to the landscape of XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence). We argue that sketch as a "human-centred" data form, represents a natural interface to study explainability. We focus on cultivating sketch-specific explainability designs. This starts by identifying strokes as a unique building block that offers a degree of flexibility in object construction and manipulation impossible in photos. Following this, we design a simple explainability-friendly sketch encoder that accommodates the intrinsic properties of strokes: shape, location, and order. We then move on to define the first ever XAI task for sketch, that of stroke location inversion SLI. Just as we have heat maps for photos, and correlation matrices for text, SLI offers an explainability angle to sketch in terms of asking a network how well it can recover stroke locations of an unseen sketch. We offer qualitative results for readers to interpret as snapshots of the SLI process in the paper, and as GIFs on the project page. A minor but interesting note is that thanks to its sketch-specific design, our sketch encoder also yields the best sketch recognition accuracy to date while having the smallest number of parameters. The code is available at https://sketchxai.github.io.

Generative models have shown great promise in synthesizing photorealistic 3D objects, but they require large amounts of training data. We introduce SinGRAF, a 3D-aware generative model that is trained with a few input images of a single scene. Once trained, SinGRAF generates different realizations of this 3D scene that preserve the appearance of the input while varying scene layout. For this purpose, we build on recent progress in 3D GAN architectures and introduce a novel progressive-scale patch discrimination approach during training. With several experiments, we demonstrate that the results produced by SinGRAF outperform the closest related works in both quality and diversity by a large margin.

Group re-identification (G-ReID) aims to re-identify a group of people that is observed from non-overlapping camera systems. The existing literature has mainly addressed RGB-based problems, but RGB-infrared (RGB-IR) cross-modality matching problem has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose a metric learning method Closest Permutation Matching (CPM) for RGB-IR G-ReID. We model each group as a set of single-person features which are extracted by MPANet, then we propose the metric Closest Permutation Distance (CPD) to measure the similarity between two sets of features. CPD is invariant with order changes of group members so that it solves the layout change problem in G-ReID. Furthermore, we introduce the problem of G-ReID without person labels. In the weak-supervised case, we design the Relation-aware Module (RAM) that exploits visual context and relations among group members to produce a modality-invariant order of features in each group, with which group member features within a set can be sorted to form a robust group representation against modality change. To support the study on RGB-IR G-ReID, we construct a new large-scale RGB-IR G-ReID dataset CM-Group. The dataset contains 15,440 RGB images and 15,506 infrared images of 427 groups and 1,013 identities. Extensive experiments on the new dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and the complexity of CM-Group. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/WhollyOat/CM-Group.

While the evaluation of explanations is an important step towards trustworthy models, it needs to be done carefully, and the employed metrics need to be well-understood. Specifically model randomization testing can be overinterpreted if regarded as a primary criterion for selecting or discarding explanation methods. To address shortcomings of this test, we start by observing an experimental gap in the ranking of explanation methods between randomization-based sanity checks [1] and model output faithfulness measures (e.g. [20]). We identify limitations of model-randomization-based sanity checks for the purpose of evaluating explanations. Firstly, we show that uninformative attribution maps created with zero pixel-wise covariance easily achieve high scores in this type of checks. Secondly, we show that top-down model randomization preserves scales of forward pass activations with high probability. That is, channels with large activations have a high probility to contribute strongly to the output, even after randomization of the network on top of them. Hence, explanations after randomization can only be expected to differ to a certain extent. This explains the observed experimental gap. In summary, these results demonstrate the inadequacy of model-randomization-based sanity checks as a criterion to rank attribution methods.

Due to the modality gap between visible and infrared images with high visual ambiguity, learning diverse modality-shared semantic concepts for visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) remains a challenging problem. Body shape is one of the significant modality-shared cues for VI-ReID. To dig more diverse modality-shared cues, we expect that erasing body-shape-related semantic concepts in the learned features can force the ReID model to extract more and other modality-shared features for identification. To this end, we propose shape-erased feature learning paradigm that decorrelates modality-shared features in two orthogonal subspaces. Jointly learning shape-related feature in one subspace and shape-erased features in the orthogonal complement achieves a conditional mutual information maximization between shape-erased feature and identity discarding body shape information, thus enhancing the diversity of the learned representation explicitly. Extensive experiments on SYSU-MM01, RegDB, and HITSZ-VCM datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Most recent 6D object pose estimation methods rely on 2D optical flow networks to refine their results. However, these optical flow methods typically do not consider any 3D shape information of the targets during matching, making them suffer in 6D object pose estimation. In this work, we propose a shape-constraint recurrent flow network for 6D object pose estimation, which embeds the 3D shape information of the targets into the matching procedure. We first introduce a flow-to-pose component to learn an intermediate pose from the current flow estimation, then impose a shape constraint from the current pose on the lookup space of the 4D correlation volume for flow estimation, which reduces the matching space significantly and is much easier to learn. Finally, we optimize the flow and pose simultaneously in a recurrent manner until convergence. We evaluate our method on three challenging 6D object pose datasets and show that it outperforms the state of the art in both accuracy and efficiency.

Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, their restored images still suffer from unsatisfactory boundary artifacts, due to the lack of degradation prior and the deficiency in modeling capacity. Our work addresses these issues by proposing a unified diffusion framework that integrates both the image and degradation priors for highly effective shadow removal. In detail, we first propose a shadow degradation model, which inspires us to build a novel unrolling diffusion model, dubbed ShandowDiffusion. It remarkably improves the model's capacity in shadow removal via progressively refining the desired output with both degradation prior and diffusive generative prior, which by nature can serve as a new strong baseline for image restoration. Furthermore, ShadowDiffusion progressively refines the estimated shadow mask as an auxiliary task of the diffusion generator, which leads to more accurate and robust shadow-free image generation. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular public datasets, including ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD, to validate our method's effectiveness. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves a significant improvement in terms of PSNR, increasing from 31.69dB to 34.73dB over SRD dataset.

We propose an approach based on convex relaxations for certifiably optimal robust multiview triangulation. To this end, we extend existing relaxation approaches to non-robust multiview triangulation by incorporating a least squares cost function. We propose two formulations, one based on epipolar constraints and one based on fractional reprojection constraints. The first is lower dimensional and remains tight under moderate noise and outlier levels, while the second is higher dimensional and therefore slower but remains tight even under extreme noise and outlier levels. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that the proposed approaches allow us to compute provably optimal reconstructions even under significant noise and a large percentage of outliers.